Epistemology Commons^™

Soma: Exploring Touch As Performance And Performance As Therapy, Erica Pamson

Expressive Therapies Theses

This project investigated the role of touch within a performative context and its potential as a creative intervention within Expressive Arts Therapy. Grounded in phenomenology and intersubjectivity, the study draws on Expressive Arts Therapy (EXAT) and Performance Art frameworks that position meaning as emerging through embodied, co-created experience. Existing literature identifies touch as a primary mode of perception and communication, essential to both physical and emotional well-being, while also noting its increasing absence and regulation within contemporary Western culture. Performance art literature further highlights the body as both medium and site of relational exchange, often dissolving boundaries between performer and …

Wind In A Dry Glass, Khia Hong

Theses and Dissertations

Khia Hong’s paper unfolds in five sections, tracing the ontological and epistemological inquiries behind her sculptures. When the sculptures stepped down from the pedestal and entered the plane of lived reality, the question “What is sculpture?” expanded into “What is sculpture, the self, and the world?” Through reflections on the self, Hong details how these questions emerge and are addressed in her material encounters.

Non-Conformity As Queerness: The Phenomenology Of Gender Identity Beyond The Binary, Gretl Josselyn

Honors Scholar Theses

Gender non-conformity is a defiance of fixed binary ideas of gender identity and expression which are enforced within societies. The phenomenological concept of breaking free from expectations based on one’s gender assigned at birth allows freedom of expression and an acceptance of non-conformity. Building on the works of Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, María Lugones, and Iria Marion Young, among others, the act of performance and queering one’s identity and actions are explored. Gender identity is constantly evolving, and each expectation of what one’s gender expression should look like is a performance put on to conform. Individuals are not born with …

Borders And Bridges In Virtual Work: Between Real And Imaginary, Valeria Rocío Gonzales González Cueva, Carmiella Salzberg Zorzi

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article discusses our reflections on how to holistically integrate reality embodied in virtual workspaces--what we perceive within our work and interaction with technology-and highlights the importance of documenting our exploration in times while Artificial Intelligence is developing. Our approach is divided into three parts: the boundaries and bridges between the real and the imaginary, the possibilities of existence and non-existence offered by technology, and the experiences of expressive arts practitioners within virtuality.

Resumen

Este artículo habla de nuestras reflexiones sobre cómo integrar de forma holística la realidad encarnada en los espacios de trabajo virtuales, lo que percibimos dentro de …

Motivation And The Primacy Of Perception : Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology Of Knowledge, Peter Antich

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological notion of motivation advances a compelling alternative to the empiricist and rationalist assumptions that underpin modern epistemology.

Arguing that knowledge is ultimately founded in perceptual experience, Peter Antich interprets and defends Merleau-Ponty’s thinking on motivation as the key to establishing a new form of epistemic grounding. Upending the classical dichotomy between reason and natural causality, justification and explanation, Antich shows how this epistemic ground enables Merleau-Ponty to offer a radically new account of knowledge and its relation to perception. In so doing, Antich demonstrates how and why Merleau-Ponty remains a vital resource for today’s epistemologists.

Locke’S Rebellious Progeny: Phenomenology And Ethics Of Leopardi’S A-Dialectical Materialism, Paolo Pellecchia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With this study I reconstruct a genealogy of the a-dialectic materialism that defines the production of 19^th-century Italian author Giacomo Leopardi and with which he criticizes canonical metaphysical stances. In this regard, I consider John Locke as the first instance of a philosophical outlook that stands as an alternative to the anthropocentrism demanded by traditional metaphysics. By focusing on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and its significant influence on Leopardi’s philosophical and aesthetic work, I emphasize how Locke’s system finds a synthetic formulation in the hypothesis, at the time highly contested yet groundbreaking, that matter might be endowed …

On The Lived Experience Of Truth In An Era Of Educational Reform: Co-Responding To Anti-Intellectualism, Matthew J. Kruger-Ross

Educational Foundations & Policy Studies Faculty Publications

The severity of the challenges made to traditionally and historically accepted understandings of truth, what is true, what is false and “fake,” and even what is real, continues unabated in American public discourse. Nevertheless, the primary argument in this paper does not aim to identify the causes of the breakdown of representation (i.e. in the Trump administration, within the education reform movement) and the correspondence-based conceptions of truth. Instead, the focus is on discussing the hermeneutic phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and offering a conceptualization of truth as lived and experienced. Challenges to truth are to be understood not as an …

Four Phases Of Subjectivity: A Rhetorical And Phenomenological Analysis Of Aimé Césaire And Cahier D’Un Retour Au Pays Natal, Chelsea Binnie

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation project sets out to perform a rhetorical and phenomenological analysis of the subjectivity that Césaire portrays in his epic poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, or Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. Césaire published and republished Cahier four times in a 17-year period and the modified accounts of subjectivity presented in the lines of the poem mirrors that of Césaire’s own human subjectivity. Césaire poetically unleashes Cahier and his Négritude project in an effort to shift the geography of reason from its self-appointed European center, to create a liminal space for the totalized …

Digitization Of The World: A Phenomenology Of Digitization, Thomas C. Adolphs

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The dissertation analyzes digitization through a phenomenological lens, understanding the digitization as an “outgrowth” of a potential that was always already latent within our being as the human-being. The analysis primarily utilizes the philosophic work of the 20^th century philosophers, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Through their philosophies, I seek to synthesize Heidegger’s concept of de-severance with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of embodiment and the world as possessing depth. In doing so, I bring these theoretical concepts together to build a phenomenological “picture” of how it is that the digitization of the world came into being. All the while, my ultimate …

Rocky Horror Sublimation: Identity As A Contingency Of Experience, Josh Harper

Senior Theses

Queer theory, as a subfield of feminist theories concerned with revealing epistemic, political, and humanitarian problems of a male-dominated society, has been heavily influenced by its founding thinkers, including Judith Butler, the theorist focused on herein. In critiquing various problems of our western society, Butler preserves the structure underlying such problems: through her approach of a gay/straight framework critiquing a male domination of female, the binary is preserved. This is problematic for many reasons, including its exclusion of perspectives that do not fall cleanly into such dichotomies, namely trans and polysexual ones. By appealing to these, as well as to …

On Craft, William Lentjes

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Craft is a relationship - a dialogue - between craftsman, tool, and material. Craft begins with the intent of all of these loci, and all of these loci are rooted in Being.

Being is known through the consciousness, awareness, and perception of a subject. Being is the inherent existence and totality of "what is."

Being crafts us; Craft imbues Being.

This thesis re-examines the pedagogical approach of an architectural education. The focus is placed on craft through presuppositionless phenomenology.

In an age of endless mechanized production and spiritless materialism, the practice of craft can teach us to return to the …

Hermeneutic Reflections On Descartes’ Introduction To His Meditations On First Philosophy, David B. Allison

Research Resources

In these extracts reflecting on Descartes’ Introduction to Meditations on First Philosophy we undertake to read between the Descartes project, reviewing Descartes’ own account of his own project. By way of a close and critical reading, the key method of any hermeneutic approach to a philosophical text, the essay seeks to explore, in a parallel to Ranke’s ideal of history as it itself actually was [eigentlich gewesen], what Descartes ‘actually’ says. In the end, this articulates Descartes’ epistemological project beyond its usual interpretative scheme.

Motivation And The Primacy Of Perception, Peter A. Antich

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

In this dissertation, I provide an interpretation and defense of Merleau-Ponty's thesis of the primacy of perception, namely, the thesis that all knowledge is founded on perceptual experience. I take as an interpretative and argumentative key Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological conception of motivation. Whereas epistemology has traditionally accepted a dichotomy between reason and natural causality, I show that this dichotomy is not exhaustive of the forms of epistemic grounding. There is a third type of grounding, the one characteristic of the grounding relations found in perception: motivation. I argue that introducing motivation as a form of epistemic grounding allows us to see …

Refreshment For The Soul: A Phenomenological Study Of The Student Experience Of Beauty In School, Paul Reiff

Dissertations

Prompted by the ratio-scientific emphasis in the curriculum, I conducted this study to explore the lifeworlds of students to understand their lived experience of beauty in school. This investigation entailed a phenomenological study, the method of which included in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with four high school students. This study aimed to examine the essence of beauty in the lived experience of students in school, to explore the perceptions of students regarding school as a place to appreciate beauty, and to understand the needs of students as a place that develops their aesthetic sensibilities. The findings include the description …

A Case For A Husserlian Willardarian Approach To Knowledge, Joseph Gibson

Masters Theses

This thesis introduces certain aspects in the thought of Dallas Willard and Edmund Husserl as a new way forward in the internalism externalism debate. Husserl’s detailed analysis of cognition has application to epistemology and addresses in great depth an area which in the current discussion is often tertiary and shallow at best. It is argued that in both internalist and externalist camps there is a common assumption about cognition which Husserl argues forcibly against. This assumption is that thought, or cognition, is essentially linguistic. (The notion that ‘thought is essentially linguistic’ means that thought requires the use of language.) Whatever …

A Humean Account Of Testimonial Justification, Shane Ryan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

I argue that a Humean account can make sense of the phenomenology associated with testimonial justification; the phenomenology being that in standard cases hearers regularly simply accept a testifier’s assertions as true – hearers don't engage in monitoring. The upshot is that a Humean account is in a better position dialectically than is usually supposed. I provide some background to the debate before setting out two challenges facing accounts of testimonial justification. The first challenge is to provide an account that accords with the phenomenology of testimonial reception; the second challenge is to provide an account that can make sense …

Partir Marron: Un Parcours Sémantique À Travers Les Trous De La Mémoire Collective Haïtienne, Lucie Carmel Paul

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The word "marron " represents both a totality, and a specificity. Totalizing, the term refers to the slave who fled from the plantation, against the colonial order, that is, the fugitive slave. Specific, in the Haitian lexicography, it stands for a shifty and cunning individual, particularily a " Woule m debò "1. One has to recognize that there is a double meaning associated with the word, and at the same time, the syntagmatic locution "partir marron " reflects the individual's dependency on phenomenology. The moment of crisis is one of an explosion, through which one can only be …

Heidegger And Our Twenty-Fi Rst Century Experience Of Ge-Stell Theodore Kisiel, Theodor Kisiel

Research Resources

I propose an etymological translation of Ge-Stell, Heidegger’s word for the essence of modern technology, from its Greek and Latin roots as “synthetic com-posit[ion]ing,” which presciently portends our twenty-first century experience of the internetted WorldWideWeb with its virtual infinity of websites in cyberspace, Global Positioning Systems, interlocking air traffic control grids, world-embracing weather maps, the 24-7 world news coverage of cable TV-networks like CNN, etc., etc.—all of which are structured by the complex programming based on the computerized and ultimately simple Leibnizian binary-digital logic generating an infinite number of combinations of the posit (1) and non-posit (0). The sharp …

Embodying Social Practice: Dynamically Co-Constituting Social Agency, Brian W. Dunst

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Theories of cognition and theories of social practices and institutions have often each separately acknowledged the relevance of the other; but seldom have there been consistent and sustained attempts to synthesize these two areas within one explanatory framework. This is precisely what my dissertation aims to remedy. I propose that certain recent developments and themes in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, when understood in the right way, can explain the emergence and dynamics of social practices and institutions. Likewise, the view I construct explains how social practices and institutions shape the character of cognition of their constituent agents. Moreover, …

Melungeon Portraits: Lived Experience And Identity, Tamara L. Stachowicz

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The desire to claim an ethnicity may be in response to an institutional and systemic political movement towards multiculturalism where ethnic difference is something to be recognized and celebrated (Jimenez, 2010; Tatum, 1997). Those who were a member of a dominant or advantaged group took that element of their identity for granted (Tatum, 1997). Identity work has included reflections and congruence between how individuals see themselves and how they perceive others to see them, including Optimal Distinctiveness Theory where one determines the optimal amount of individual distinctiveness needed to feel a healthy group and personal identity (Brewer, 2012). When most …